took a step forward—there was a gasp of awe from the Norseman, a guttural exclamation from Marakinoff. For on, or rather within, the wall before us, a great oval began to glow, waxed almost to a flame and then shone steadily out as though from behind it a light was streaming through the stone itself!
And within the roseate oval two flame-tipped shadows appeared, stood for a moment, and then seemed to float out upon its surface. The shadows wavered; the tips of flame that nimbused them with flickering points of vermilion pulsed outward, drew back, darted forth again, and once more withdrew themselves—and as they did so the shadows thickened—and suddenly there before us stood two figures!
One was a girl—a girl whose great eyes were golden as the fabled lilies of Kwan-Yung that were born of the kiss of the sun upon the amber goddess the demons of Lao-Tz’e carved for him; whose softly curved lips were red as the royal coral, and whose golden-brown hair reached to her knees!
And the second was a gigantic frog—a woman frog, head helmeted with carapace of shell around which a fillet of brilliant yellow jewels shone; enormous round eyes of blue circled with a broad iris of green; monstrous body of banded orange and white girdled with strand upon strand of the flashing yellow gems; six feet high if an inch, and with one webbed paw of its short, powerfully muscled forelegs resting upon the white shoulder of the golden-eyed girl!
Moments must have passed as we stood in stark amazement, gazing at that incredible apparition. The two figures, although as real as any of those who stood beside me, unphantomlike as it is possible to be, had a distinct suggestion of—projection.
They were there before us—golden-eyed girl and grotesque frog-woman—complete in every line and curve; and still it was as though their bodies passed back through distances; as though, to try to express the wellnigh inexpressible, the two shapes we were looking upon were the end of an infinite number stretching in fine linked chain far away, of which the eyes saw only the nearest, while in the brain some faculty higher than sight recognized and registered the unseen others.
The gigantic eyes of the frog-woman took us all in—unwinkingly. Little glints of phosphorescence shone out within the metallic green of the outer iris ring. She stood upright, her great legs bowed; the monstrous slit of a mouth slightly open, revealing a row of white teeth sharp and pointed as lancets; the paw resting on the girl’s shoulder, half covering its silken surface, and from its five webbed digits long yellow claws of polished horn glistened against the delicate texture of the flesh.
But if the frog-woman regarded us all, not so did the maiden of the rosy wall. Her eyes were fastened upon Larry, drinking him in with extraordinary intentness. She was tall, far over the average of women, almost as tall, indeed, as O’Keefe himself; not more than twenty years old, if that, I thought. Abruptly she leaned forward, the golden eyes softened and grew tender; the red lips moved as though she were speaking.
Larry took a quick step, and his face was that of one who after countless births comes at last upon the twin soul lost to him for ages. The frog-woman turned her eyes upon the girl; her huge lips moved, and I knew that she was talking! The girl held out a warning hand to O’Keefe, and then raised it, resting each finger upon one of the five flowers of the carved vine close beside her. Once, twice, three times, she pressed upon the flower centres, and I noted that her hand was curiously long and slender, the digits like those wonderful tapering ones the painters we call the primitive gave to their Virgins.
Three times she pressed the flowers, and then looked intently at Larry once more. A slow, sweet smile curved the crimson lips. She stretched both hands out toward him again eagerly; a burning blush rose swiftly over white breasts and flowerlike face.
Like the clicking out of a cinematograph, the pulsing oval faded and golden-eyed girl and frog-woman were gone!
And thus it was that Lakla, the handmaiden of the Silent Ones, and Larry O’Keefe first looked into each other’s hearts!
Larry stood rapt, gazing at the stone.
“Eilidh,” I heard him whisper; “Eilidh of the lips like the red, red rowan and the golden-brown hair!”
“Clearly of the Ranadae,” said Marakinoff, “a development of the fossil Labyrinthodonts: you saw her teeth, da?”
“Ranadae, yes,” I answered. “But from the Stegocephalia; of the order Ecaudata—”
Never such a complete indignation as was in O’Keefe’s voice as he interrupted.
“What do you mean—fossils and Stego whatever it is?” he asked. “She was a girl, a wonder girl—a real girl, and Irish, or I’m not an O’Keefe!”
“We were talking about the frog-woman, Larry,” I said, conciliatingly.
His eyes were wild as he regarded us.
“Say,” he said, “if you two had been in the Garden of Eden when Eve took the apple, you wouldn’t have had time to give her a look for counting the scales on the snake!”
He strode swiftly over to the wall. We followed. Larry paused, stretched his hand up to the flowers on which the tapering fingers of the golden-eyed girl had rested.
“It was here she put up her hand,” he murmured. He pressed caressingly the carved calyxes, once, twice, a third time even as she had—and silently and softly the wall began to split; on each side a great stone pivoted slowly, and before us a portal stood, opening into a narrow corridor glowing with the same rosy lustre that had gleamed around the flame-tipped shadows!
“Have your gun ready, Olaf!” said Larry. “We follow Golden Eyes,” he said to me.
“Follow?” I echoed stupidly.
“Follow!” he said. “She came to show us the way! Follow? I’d follow her through a thousand hells!”
And with Olaf at one end, O’Keefe at the other, both of them with automatics in hand, and Marakinoff and I between them, we stepped over the threshold.
At our right, a few feet away, the passage ended abruptly in a square of polished stone, from which came faint rose radiance. The roof of the place was less than two feet over O’Keefe’s head.
A yard at left of us lifted a four-foot high, gently curved barricade, stretching from wall to wall—and beyond it was blackness; an utter and appalling blackness that seemed to gather itself from infinite depths. The rose-glow in which we stood was cut off by the blackness as though it had substance; it shimmered out to meet it, and was checked as though by a blow; indeed, so strong was the suggestion of sinister, straining force within the rayless opacity that I shrank back, and Marakinoff with me. Not so O’Keefe. Olaf beside him, he strode to the wall and peered over. He beckoned us.
“Flash your pocket-light down there,” he said to me, pointing into the thick darkness below us. The little electric circle quivered down as though afraid, and came to rest upon a surface that resembled nothing so much as clear, black ice. I ran the light across—here and there. The floor of the corridor was of a substance so smooth, so polished, that no man could have walked upon it; it sloped downward at a slowly increasing angle.
“We’d have to have non-skid chains and brakes on our feet to tackle that,” mused Larry. Abstractedly be ran his hands over the edge on which he was leaning. Suddenly they hesitated and then gripped tightly.
“That’s a queer one!” he exclaimed. His right palm was resting upon a rounded protuberance, on the side of which were three small circular indentations.
